Day: 2016-10-17

So I have been saying for over a year now that I personally do not feel that we have this widespread, full blown issue with police who are racially bias or just shooting unarmed black men.

The news stories that we have seen represent a relatively smaller number, much smaller than everyone realizes.

And finally, it would seem that the director of the FBI has actually admitted to a group of police chiefs that we really don’t know if we have an issue or not.

Do we have issues in some communities? Absolutely, we do. We have seen the issues but, what we see on the news does not represent police nationwide in every single city or town.

Do police need to improve the relationship that they have with the communities they serve? Yes, even if the relationships are deemed good, they need to work to make them better. As people grow and change so do the communities police serve because people and communities are always changing.

The one disagreement that I would have with James and the Department of Justice is that, it wouldn’t take a year or longer to gather the data needed and back track specifically just police shootings by race.

I detest when the government tells us how long, tedious, expensive and drawn out that gathering the intel would be. Most of us have to gather information including historical information on a daily basis.

All we use out here in the real world is this neat thing called a spreadsheet, maybe the FBI and the DOJ have heard of it, you can add things like pivot tables, graphs, charts and the like, and even better is that you have add a tab at the bottom that can be used for each state, city, municipality and through the use of formula’s the spreadsheets will actually do the math for you.

It’s amazing all of the data that you can put into something as simple as a spreadsheet.

The best part is, it’s not encrypted by Apple so the FBI shouldn’t have an issue accessing it or using it yet.

Then all the DOJ would need is the ability to make a phone call and request each city, town, municipality and state fill out his or her tab on the spreadsheet that they emailed them and well it’s cake from then on.

They don’t even need to hire additional staff for this task, we’ve all seen the news reports about how cities, towns, states and the Federal Government employees are overpaid and waste time.

I mean at the end of the day, I worked for a city once and well the stories are sort of true. We even had a guy searching for his internet bride while at work, so it’s not like the government doesn’t already have an employee or two or a few who can gather the information and pop it into a spreadsheet.

You could purchase or have software made for this but to begin, everyone is really just looking for numbers by race here and maybe whether or not the police felt the suspect posed a threat. Maybe.

At any rate, the director made a statement with regards to police shootings that went something like “people who think there’s an epidemic of police shootings of black people aren’t well-informed.”

My response to that is, why wait to inform us. The history is in front of us now, put your money where your mouth is because it’s different when I tell people that I do not believe in this epidemic, I am a private citizen who does not work for the government, I do not have the authority to start pulling all of the needed data from police departments nationwide.

Trust me, if I had my hands on it, you would be seeing the numbers for the last 5 years today along with stats which tell you if the suspect was armed, running, appeared to be armed but wasn’t, drunk, high whatever, instead of reading that if you think there’s an epidemic of police shootings of black people, you are not well informed.

The director of the FBI however does have access to the data now and he has the authority to get it now. Instead of working to gather the information over the last year he’s been working to try to convince police departments it is a good thing to track and share officer involved shootings and use of force with the DOJ…

This really is not rocket science so I am not sure why the DOJ has sold it that way…if they want to add fuel to the idea that maybe we are not looking at an epidemic, they should be backing that idea up with numbers instead of saying things like people are not well informed and “A small group of videos serve as an epidemic.”

Then again in the wake of agents who came out with issues regarding how the FBI handled the Hillary Clinton email scandal…

The FBI and the DOJ will be heading into this with an already badly tarnished reputation and more trust issues than they had before where the public is concerned.

How do you play the game when you’ve already lost the trust of the public?

Right now all people want to see are the numbers, not the excuse for why that follow.